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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#581

Post by ahartmetz »

lmm wrote: post #571
dripdry45 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to make those opportunities to plan long-term. Once you start to form those, it will be amazing how many opportunities present themselves.

That's a contingent fact about the place and era you live in. Medieval peasants - the majority of people who have ever lived - were not dumbasses, not all of them - but there simply wasn't a way for even the smartest to accumulate long-term wealth. At best you could maybe get your neighbours to owe you a few more favours, and maybe once in a generation if you played every card right there might be a chance for a patr…

Money was useful - not as much as today, sure. But traders and tradespeople existed in the middle ages, so you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes / fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house...

Some of these things you could make yourself or were commonly self-made instead of buying, but that, too, requires planning and discipline.

I'm a bit shocked that some people think of medieval life as something like Elbonia in Dilbert comics. Heck, I even find the middle ages a pretty boring time in human history, but I know enough to understand that it wasn't as simple as "everyone lived in the mud and ate mud".

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#582

Post by CJefferson »

abricq wrote: post #70

> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would…

I'm a professor at uni, and this is what is happening -- many students are never really learning. Then they crash into exams at the end of term when they don't have their AI, and they bomb, I'm seeing failure rates like never before.

Now, part of me thinks 'is not letting students having AI like not letting them have a calculator'. On the other hand, if I just let the AI do the exam, well I don't really need the student at all do I?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#583

Post by nradov »

archagon wrote: post #545
nradov wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already several fully open source LLMs. You can start participating in those projects today. https://www.bentoml.com/blog/navigating-the-world-of-open-so...

Are most of these distilled from other models? I'm talking about publicly owned and fully open foundation models, which will require significant government-level investment into GPU farms and training. No chance of it happening in the US due to lobbying pressure, but maybe in a more civilized country... (unless a distributed SETI@home-type architecture becomes viable)

I don't understand your comment. The USA is the most civilized country in the world. And some of the LLMs linked above are fully open source.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#584

Post by tithe »

munificent wrote: post #472
abricq wrote: post #70

> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would…

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

How about professions that require licensing to practice (civil engineering, accounting, insurance, actuarial science, law, medicine, pharmacy, nursing), or work in the government sector (defense, military, municipal/state/federal agencies)?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#585

Post by NateEag »

aphyr wrote: post #263
dang wrote: post #249

Here are the articles in this series that got significant HN discussion (in chronological order for a change): ML promises to be profoundly weird* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (602 comments) The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528 - April 2026 (106 comments) The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyance…

If you enjoyed reading these and would like more, very few folks read sections 2, 4, or 6. They might be up your alley: 2. Dynamics - https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies... 4. Information Ecology - https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies... 6. Psychological Hazards - https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

I have read every post in the series and really appreciated it.

I've had a tremendous amount of respect for you since I first encountered the Jepsen analyses, but your breakdown of the likely impacts of LLMs and ML may impress me more.

You've articulated very well several concerns of mine that I haven't seen anyone else mention, and highlighted other issues I had not previously recognized.

Thank you for publishing this now, when it could still have some influence, rather than polishing and researching and refining until it was thoroughly rigorous and too late to be relevant.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#586

Post by coderenegade »

ryandrake wrote: post #438
Negitivefrags wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable. This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.

> Cars are not popular becuase people pushed them. Cars are popular because the utility is undeniable. I think this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Cars' utility is undeniable partially because society has twisted itself thoroughly around The Car being an assumed part of it. This societal change was both pulled (by car customers) and pushed (by car manufacturers).

Cars won because they were (and are) better than the alternatives. The need for powerful individual transportation with utility has always existed, and was originally met with horses. Bicycles meet the transportation need, but not the need for utility. Cars do both, and they do it better than anything else. Even before fueling infrastructure was rolled out, you could still run a car on petroleum you bought from the chemist, which is still infinitely better than the acres of pasture you need for horses. If you had an early diesel, it would run on oil, which is even easier.

The idea that cars needed all this infrastructure that other alternatives didn't just doesn't match the reality of the history of the automobile. And yes, we've leaned on those advantages in the century since, which has also created vast areas where a car is necessary to participate in society, but we only did so because the advantages and utility were so undeniable.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#587

Post by ItsClo688 »

munificent wrote: post #456
Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills. You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#588

Post by mumbisChungo »

I think it's shortsighted to dismiss the utility of these technologies for learning. I find personally that putting the LLM into an argumentative state then having it challenge my assertions forces me to learn and develop my own thoughts and feelings more effectively than writing does these days, and I find that interrogating a model on a subject can teach me more about the subject per unit time than reading a textbook or research paper. Sometimes I'll even just have it read the raw text out loud- then interject and have a conversation about a specific thing that I don't have the domain knowledge to fully understand. Other times we'll end up off on a productive tangent.

Interactive learning and thinking is underrated, in part I think because of the cynical (and likely accurate) assumption about what the laziest among us will do with the tools, but projected onto everyone.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#589

Post by ItsClo688 »

DavidPiper wrote: post #512
Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately: "Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive] Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world…

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#590

Post by hackable_sand »

marxisttemp wrote: post #541
sillysaurusx wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although primogeniture has been discriminatory for basically the entire time it's existed, the discrimination isn't inherent. It's an implementation detail. Modern British Royal succession now uses absolute, gender-neutral primogeniture since 2013. In fact, there are few things less discriminatory than a random birth order. You may as well be assigned a random number at birth, and the lower your number, the more you'…

Primogeniture in any form is discriminatory precisely since birth order is an immutable, permanent, unchosen characteristic assigned randomly at birth, just like race or sex.

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